I am skeptical that the unusual beliefs and behaviors of Northwest Europeans came from marriage patterns established by the Catholic church. And unless someone can come up with evidence of similar beliefs and behaviors within the early steppe invaders of Europe, I am skeptical of that origin as well.
I think the most likely origin of WIERD psychologies and behaviors was living within societies with comparatively high levels of market exchange for many generations. There is quite a lot of evidence (including from Henrich himself) that people enmeshed within market societies think and act differently than other people. Most likely sexual selection of women choosing to marry successful men who then had babies more likely to survive into adulthood was a key part of that shift.
I agree that a relationship exists between WEIRDness and the creation of a market economy. To me, it looks like the former preceded the latter.
Yes, markets have long existed. In the Middle East, we see evidence of marketplaces in prehistoric times. Yet Middle Easterners are not WEIRD. Some of the most market-savvy people in the world are the antithesis of WEIRDness.
Keep in mind that a market is not the same thing as a market economy. A market is a small island of commercial activity in a "sea" where most transactions are obligations to family or kin (or symbolic transactions with dead ancestors).
A market economy has at least the potential to commercialize all transactions within a society. It is a radical and relatively recent form of social organization, essentially post-medieval. Today, we live in a market economy where the family is restricted to an increasingly vestigial role.
Yes, it is not the existence of markets that matter. Markets go all the back to Hunter Gatherer times. That is why I phrased it “living within societies with comparatively high levels of market exchange for many generations.” I am referring more to what you call a “market economy”, which prehistoric Middle East clearly does not fit that description.
I am more referring to Commercial societies, such as Medieval Northern Italy, the Dutch Republic, pre-industrial England, and societies that have industrialized many generations ago.
Of course, it is hard to identify the psychologies and behaviors of 9th-century farmers in Northwest Europe, but my guess is that they were much closer to peasants in the rest of Eurasia than to modern WIERD westerners. They certainly were not Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.
Other than marriage patterns which you identify in this article, what evidence is there that WIERD goes back more than a millennium?
What societies are you referring to when you say “some of the most market-savvy people in the world are the antithesis of WEIRDness?” Japan, perhaps?
"Other than marriage patterns which you identify in this article, what evidence is there that WIERD goes back more than a millennium?"
- the testimonies of Caesar and Tacitus on late age of marriage in Germanic peoples. - - the surveys of French estates from the 9th century that show high rates of unmarried adults and small, nuclear families.
"What societies are you referring to when you say “some of the most market-savvy people in the world are the antithesis of WEIRDness? Japan, perhaps?”
Or China. Actually, most populations that have specialized in trade: Parsis, Armenians, Jews, Igbos, ...
That is not evidence of WIERD psychology. That is just repeating the evidence of differing marriage patterns. They are not the same. There may not be any cause and effect between the two at all.
WIERD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Key features of WEIRD psychology, as identified by Henrich, include:
1) Individualism – Emphasis on personal autonomy, self-expression, and independence.
2) Analytical thinking – Tendency to focus on objects independently of their context, using formal logic and categorization.
3) Impersonal prosociality – Cooperation with strangers and adherence to abstract rules or norms (e.g., legal systems), rather than kin-based or face-to-face reciprocity.
4) Guilt-based morality – Moral reasoning rooted in internalized guilt and individual conscience rather than external shame or honor.
5) Low relational thinking – Less emphasis on social roles, obligations, and context-specific behaviors.
I don't think the Germanic peoples of Roman times, or the French in the 9th century fit that description at all, regardless of their marriage patterns.
In fact, you are giving evidence that marriage patterns do not lead to WIERD psychology.
I know that Henrich assumes that WIERD psychology stems from the Catholic church changing marriage patterns, but that is the supposed cause, not the effect that needs to be explained. You seem to agree with Henrich that WIERD psychologies come from marriage patterns, but you think that Western marriage patterns occurred long before the Catholic church.
But neither of you gives much evidence that unique marriage patterns are what actually created WIERD psychologies.
I am not convinced that the Chinese, Parsis, Armenians, Jews, and Igbos lived in Commercial societies for centuries. It is true that they were successful middleman minorities in societies dominated by other ethnic groups, but I am not sure that is the same. It might lead to very different outcomes.
Behavior indicates psychology. I'm not inferring anything here. If people married in their mid to late 20s and died in their 40s, they would be spending about a third of their adulthood as individuals. That is very unusual if we look at other world cultures.
Behavior and psychology are both part of the same adaptive package. So I'm not really agreeing with Heinrich's argument that a certain behavioral pattern caused a certain psychological pattern. The two coevolved together.
perhaps there are subtle genetic differences between northern euroasians and southcentral asians (chinese), southeastern asians, austronesians, indigenous north and south american and various african lineages that are the result of the different genetic mxtures (sapien, neanderthal, denisovan, related hominins and subsequent the various hunter-gatherer lineages) that occurred in the various societies and how those pre-historical societies selected for certain more successful lineages to predominate. various tribal cultures developed certain technologies and lifestyle approaches and prehistoric cultures faced "selective" pressures" from "alien" cultures (adapt or defend yourself successfully or be obliterated as a culture and "people"). the result is that WEIRD societies and the lineages most successful in enlarging themselves within this technological-social network survive and prosper (multiply over generations). their behaviour forced other cultures to change and adapt to changed circumstances (e.g. being conquered by an outsider tribe with a different social structure). and WEIRD is the predominant culture in our times....it conquered the world in the 1500-1700's (european exploration and colonization of the world with guns and horses and disease and ocean going vessels to span the globe and pillage and enslave the "more technologically primitive inhabitants"). we live in that world now, but it may not necessarily be "democratic" in the future.
Perhaps, but that seems pretty speculative to me. I do not think that there is much evidence for higher levels of development in Northwest Europe before 1200. In fact, the region was a laggard compared to most agricultural regions in Eurasia.
Interesting, and research seems to support the idea that preexisting tendencies have been formalised in Christianity. As to the specifics of the reasons why, perhaps the greater degree of individual self-sufficiency, and ability to adapt to lone environments predisposed NW Europeans to more individualism. That is not to say clans and family lines were unimportant, but the multiple layers of Roman and Germanic customs, cultural and ethnic cross-pollination and more fundamentally, climate which demands a lot of personal investment for survival means that small family groups are preferred, as opposed to a large number of closely related people that strain boh resource availability and genetic variability.
The mystery is why WEIRDness evolved in northwest Europeans and not in other populations. The only thing that really sets them apart in prehistory would be the large numbers of fisher-sealers who lived around the North Sea and the Baltic during Mesolithic times. This was one of the few cases where humans developed large semi-sedentary communities without the benefit of farming. For half of the year, they congregated in large coastal settlements for fishing and sealing.
That kind of social environment may have weakened kinship ties in order to reduce clan rivalry. There may also have been selection for impersonal pro-sociality and for moral systems that apply equally to everyone, regardless of kin relatedness.
I think you are right to link those changes to the proximity of sea-based resources, where NW Europe centres around the North Sea. I would not discount influence of cultural effects, which could have an epigenetic effect when combined with those resource limitations and patterns.
Seafaring might have contributed as well, and perhaps the degree of independence afforded by the ability to navigate and travel from place to place, combined with the seasonal settlements meant that kinship was not as important, if you could pack up your folks on a boat and go wherever the fishing was better. Clan relations and numbers are important for animal husbandry or control over fertile land, but if you want the ability to swiftly move from place to place, but at the same time want to be able to survive at sea, your kinship groups downsize, but then you have greater likelihood to help strangers in need at sea, as you would expect similar reciprocity. But that's all speculative.
Overall this puzzle is one that continues to drive the exceptionality of WEIRD, but perhaps there is a degree of narrow focus that overplays these factors - weight of cultural development for the first few millennia rested with the Mediterranean, while land power rested with the steppe peoples of Eastern Europe and the Pontic Steppe, who used their animal husbandry to control both kinship and land.
I'm surprised as well. My previous understanding was the total opposite- i.e, that restrictions on cousin marriage were something imposed on the pagan world very much in opposition to their habit and custom (I guess monogamy was more of the imposition in that respect.)
Christianity arose in the Middle East, where polygyny and cousin marriage were accepted practices. The restrictions placed on both reflect the Europeanization of Christianity.
If we look at the ratio of Y chromosome diversity to X chromosome diversity, we find that it is highest among Europeans and lowest among Sub-Saharan Africans. This suggests that the polygyny rate was much lower among Europeans both in historic and prehistoric times.
Scozzari, R., Cruciani, F., Malaspina, P., Santolamazza, P., Ciminelli, B. M., Torroni, A., ... & Novelletto, A. (1997). Differential structuring of human populations for homologous X and Y microsatellite loci. The American Journal of Human Genetics, 61(3), 719-733. https://doi.org/10.1086/515500
Torroni, A., Semino, O., Scozzari, R., Sirugo, G., Spedini, G., Abbas, N., ... & Benerecetti, A. S. (1990). Y chromosome DNA polymorphisms in human populations: differences between Caucasoids and Africans detected by 49a and 49f probes. Annals of human genetics, 54(4), 287-296. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-1809.1990.tb00384.x
The excerpt you quoted from Gnecchi-Ruscone et al., 2024 explicitly mentions "a high occurrence of levirate and multipartner unions". It's right there, man.
Maybe this was more pronounced in SSA, but Charlemagne had three wives and several concubines, IIRC, and he was technically Christian.
What do you think the term "high occurrence" means in this context? Out of a total of 236 male individuals, the authors found 15 cases of polygyny. Most of the cases may involve serial polygyny, but it's impossible to say for sure.
That's a polygyny rate of 6%, most of which may be serial polygyny.
As for Charlemagne, he was a monarch — in fact, one of the most powerful monarchs of his time. In Sub-Saharan Africa, polygyny was much more widespread, being practiced by over 20% of the men and most of the women.
It is quite evident that the people of Northwestern Europe are different from others. However, Christianity played a minimal role in differentiation. Christianity adopted the existing norms.
Didn't Aporia post research a while back indicating genetic changes during the Christian period after a period of late-Roman dysgenics? Small sample size made me a bit skeptical though.
I believe there has been a coevolution between Christianity and Europeans. Christianity helped reverse the decline of the family, especially among the elites, at a time when paganism could do nothing.
Again, Christianity did not so much create new values as give new life to old ones that had fallen into decay and decline.
Yes, I think that's it. It's curious that greco-roman paganism wasn't able to reform itself when it had clearly been able to sustain a high level of civilisation previously, though. Maybe political syncretism/hollow orthopraxy sapped the energy somehow?
There were attempts to reform paganism, but they were ultimately efforts to create a pagan form of Christianity. So why choose a photocopy, when you can get the original?
I don't know. Nostalgia? National pride? Continuity with ancestral tradition? There had to be ascetic/apollonian elements of pagan religious practice to fall back on, it just seems odd that those were never revived if the cultural appetite for it was there.
There was a brief revival under Julian the Apostate. But one man can do only so much, and the majority of Romans were at best part-time pagans. There was no pagan "church" that could teach paganism and motivate people to be pagan.
In contrast, Christians excelled at organization and indoctrination. They had unity of action and purpose. They knew what they wanted, and they methodically went about doing it.
The most obvious impact of Christianity on European family structure was probably the ban on polygamy by European elites and the valorisation of romantic love.
Also given that Islam, another universalistic religion, might have introduced cousin marriages to many regions, makes the spread of Christianity in Europe good because it could be used as a collective bulwark against Islam.
Cousin marriage was more common in the Middle East than in Europe even before Islam. It seems to have begun because people were afraid of marrying someone who had a "tainted" bloodline (e.g., a slave ancestor). Since people knew their own bloodline better than those of others, they considered it "safer" to marry a cousin.
Christianity began in the Middle East, where polygyny was accepted (although subject to certain limitations). The ban on polygyny developed as Christianity became Europeanized. This form of marriage and concubinage did become common during the time of Imperial Rome, but it was considered to be "un-Roman." In banning it, the Church was seeking to restore pre-existing sexual norms.
I recently read Joseph Henrich’s Weirdest People in the World. Fascinating book. But it’s interesting to read a contrary opinion on the cousin marriage ban hypothesis.
I’m curious about what the bones of people living in conflict-intense places like pre-Christian Ireland and Scotland (including Northumbria that had seen 700 years of unceasing violence). They seemed to be far more clannish as a result of warrior culture. At the same time, the Northumbrians didn’t hesitate to prefer a hermitage-type settlement in Backcountry of America, but would still rally as a clan to a call for help. This blend of individualistic and clannish behavior seemed to help them be more flexible with evolving circumstances.
The Celtic fringe of Europe seems to be less individualistic and more clannish, i.e., Irish, Scottish, and Icelanders (who are part Irish by ancestry). It looks like the selection pressure for individualism was strongest among the populations bordering the North Sea and the Baltic. It was progressively weaker in populations farther away.
Yes, this has been my observation too from your notes and the others. I am growing more convinced that the fish-eating tribes around the North Sea is the real source of modernity as the major groups behind the early industrialization and individualistic ethics tends to be the Dutch, England’s Kent, East Anglia, and Midlands, and Germany’s Hanseatic League. King Edward III’s woolen goods policy may be the first deliberate industry policy, later built on by Henry VII.
Even if Christianity had never existed, something like it would have developed in Europe, and even more so in northwest Europe.
First, Roman society had large numbers of rootless people with no close kin to help them out. This was especially true for slaves and ex-slaves, but it was also true for other people. The low birth rate left many adults without close kin. For such people, the local church offered a substitute family and recreated a family atmosphere with the help of kinship symbolism ("brothers and sisters in Christ," "God the father," etc.).
Second, as civilization spread into northwest Europe, the local beliefs and customs would have been reorganized into something like Christianity. People would still have needed some kind of institutionalized means to purge their burden of guilt, e.g., confession, penance, absolution, etc. They would also have institutionalized charity in various ways, e.g., alms for the poor, hospices, etc.
All of this was less true in Japan. The Japanese do not accumulate a burden of guilt that has to be regularly purged, as is the case with northwest Europeans. Nor do they have the same compulsive need to help strangers.
Jesus wished to reduce, if not eliminate, the importance of kinship in a society where kinship was all important. This is partly why Christianity enjoyed more success in Europe than in the Middle East.
Beautifully interesting, thank you. Probably people would jump on their cousins for the simple reason that the cousins were the humans close and available, not particularly for their cousin-ness. Assuming that this tendency would have been driven by genes and that there would have been a genetic change somehow intertwined with the cultural change that would have weakened this tendency: Would it make sense to look for a correlation with the known genetic markers for autistic traits?
Cousins are "pre-vetted." You already know almost everything about their background and ancestry. If need be, you can ask your own parents for more information. This is why Charles Darwin married his first cousin; she was already part of his social circle. There was no need to have someone introduce her to him.
It's important to distinguish between three things: 1) avoidance of cousin marriage; 2) non-avoidance of cousin marriage; and 3) preference for cousin marriage. In pre-Christian Europe, the aDNA evidence suggests that people were deliberately avoiding cousin marriage. This suggests some kind of cultural norm against it, which Christianity later assimilated, especially Western Christianity.
Preference for cousin marriage is the opposite, i.e., a cultural norm favoring cousin marriage. Perhaps this cultural norm may have selected for an innate, hardwired preference in certain human populations, but I don't know of any research on the subject.
Right now I'm trying to write an essay on the evolution of consciousness in the animal kingdom. I begin with mere animal sentience, which I define as the ability to distinguish physical pleasure and pain and to respond accordingly. Next I add memory, i.e., an ability to learn from experience, which gives rise to emotions like fear, anxiety, hope, anticipation and the like. Then after memory I add sex and sexual reproduction, which gives rise to alpha male dominance behavior, status striving, and along with them to emotions like love,, envy, jealousy, hatred and commitment to kin. And then finally I try to survey all of those higher, complex human emotions brought into being by by the appearance of language and culture working in combination with an enormous increase in average human intelligence: everything from feelings of boredom and curiosity to an ability to enjoy myths, fables, songs, wit, humor, music, art, and so on that are found in all human societies, both primitive and civilized. The human desire to be entertained, especially once one's other needs have been met, is virtually insatiable.
Now when it comes to that unique northwestern European WEIRD culture Peter is writing about here, I think we must add to this list all those complex emotions that we associate with our commitment to Western liberal ideals of freedom and justice: ideals that find their first and most beautiful expression in the hopes and dreams of Judeo-Christianity, and which today's patriotic Americans feel whenever they contemplate sacred documents like the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, for which they feel a deep sense of gratitude and appreciation.
In addition, WEIRDness would also seem seem to lie behind those emotions that motivate a widespread if not universal hunger to understand the world and the universe we live in in abstract rational terms, a hunger that was first manifested in classical Greece (another WEIRD society?) and that finds its most characteristic expression in today's social and physical sciences.
Is there anything major I've left off of this list?
How about peer pressure and emotions of conformity, embarrassment, guilt, and the like that we associate with our being social animals living in relatively outbred, un-consanguineous groups, feelings of the kind Adam Smith was writing about in his Theory of Moral Sentiments?
I would appreciate anything Peter has to say on this subject.
WEIRD people have moved from kin-based morality to universal morality. In other words, they like to obey universal rules and dislike asking "Is it good for us folks?"
This doesn't mean that WEIRD people cannot draw a line between insiders and outsiders. In fact, they can hate outsiders with an extreme passion, but they define this hatred in moralistic terms. The Other isn't simply different. The Other is evil.
Northwest Europeans seem to have a stronger desire to identify "rules" and then follow them without question, come what may. This is what we call a "conscience" and what Sigmund Freud called the "super ego." The super ego enforces the rules by punishing the rule-breaker with feelings of guilt. Thus, without a strong capacity for guilt, humans cannot progress from the family-based morality of small societies to the universal morality of large ones:
"If civilization is a necessary course of development from the family to humanity as a whole, then ... there is inextricably bound up with it an increase of the sense of guilt, which will perhaps reach heights that the individual finds hard to tolerate." (Freud, 1962, p. 80).
This super ego can terrorize you into obeying the rules. Although the rules are softwired, your desire to follow them, and be punished for breaking them, is hardwired:
"... for the new authority, the super-ego, has no motive that we know of for ill-treating the ego, with which it is intimately bound up; but genetic influence, which leads to the survival of what is past and has been surmounted, makes itself felt in the fact that fundamentally things remain as they were at the beginning. The super-ego torments the sinful ego with the same feeling of anxiety and is on the watch for opportunities of getting it punished by the external world." (Freud, 1962, p. 72)
This is an awkward translation. By "genetic influence, which leads to the survival of what is past and has been surmounted," he means inherited mental traits that exist because they have helped humans survive and reproduce in the past. The super ego is thus an innate structure in your mind that torments you for breaking the rules. It can even compel you to seek punishment in "the external world."
Freud, S. (1962[1930]). Civilization and Its Discontents, New York: W.W. Norton
I’d still place restrictions on cousin marriage as downstream of western weirdness, not causal. I think a soft institutional perspective brought on by western individualism is at the core, and that likely comes from western religious organization and philosophy. Fascinating read, though.
At the time, the restrictions were referred to as "Germanic." I agree that the Western Church played a key organizational role in consolidating existing norms and enforcing them more effectively.
Pre-Christian Europeans were always more individualistic than other human groups that were more group dominated, suppressed and therefore had no large unity for defense strength. They invented their way out of problems or migrated. Both positive and negative results. Christianity was imposed via financial leverage at first. The combination of the two led to their loss of cultural continuity and being destroyed from the core outward. Shreds remain in distorted forms.
I recall one of the emperors in Europe was told he had to have everyone of his subjects converted so he could be part of a trading arrangement. Not a history buff but that stayed with me once I heard it.
Very interesting article.
I am skeptical that the unusual beliefs and behaviors of Northwest Europeans came from marriage patterns established by the Catholic church. And unless someone can come up with evidence of similar beliefs and behaviors within the early steppe invaders of Europe, I am skeptical of that origin as well.
I think the most likely origin of WIERD psychologies and behaviors was living within societies with comparatively high levels of market exchange for many generations. There is quite a lot of evidence (including from Henrich himself) that people enmeshed within market societies think and act differently than other people. Most likely sexual selection of women choosing to marry successful men who then had babies more likely to survive into adulthood was a key part of that shift.
I agree that a relationship exists between WEIRDness and the creation of a market economy. To me, it looks like the former preceded the latter.
Yes, markets have long existed. In the Middle East, we see evidence of marketplaces in prehistoric times. Yet Middle Easterners are not WEIRD. Some of the most market-savvy people in the world are the antithesis of WEIRDness.
Keep in mind that a market is not the same thing as a market economy. A market is a small island of commercial activity in a "sea" where most transactions are obligations to family or kin (or symbolic transactions with dead ancestors).
A market economy has at least the potential to commercialize all transactions within a society. It is a radical and relatively recent form of social organization, essentially post-medieval. Today, we live in a market economy where the family is restricted to an increasingly vestigial role.
Yes, it is not the existence of markets that matter. Markets go all the back to Hunter Gatherer times. That is why I phrased it “living within societies with comparatively high levels of market exchange for many generations.” I am referring more to what you call a “market economy”, which prehistoric Middle East clearly does not fit that description.
I am more referring to Commercial societies, such as Medieval Northern Italy, the Dutch Republic, pre-industrial England, and societies that have industrialized many generations ago.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/commercial-societies
Of course, it is hard to identify the psychologies and behaviors of 9th-century farmers in Northwest Europe, but my guess is that they were much closer to peasants in the rest of Eurasia than to modern WIERD westerners. They certainly were not Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.
Other than marriage patterns which you identify in this article, what evidence is there that WIERD goes back more than a millennium?
What societies are you referring to when you say “some of the most market-savvy people in the world are the antithesis of WEIRDness?” Japan, perhaps?
"Other than marriage patterns which you identify in this article, what evidence is there that WIERD goes back more than a millennium?"
- the testimonies of Caesar and Tacitus on late age of marriage in Germanic peoples. - - the surveys of French estates from the 9th century that show high rates of unmarried adults and small, nuclear families.
"What societies are you referring to when you say “some of the most market-savvy people in the world are the antithesis of WEIRDness? Japan, perhaps?”
Or China. Actually, most populations that have specialized in trade: Parsis, Armenians, Jews, Igbos, ...
That is not evidence of WIERD psychology. That is just repeating the evidence of differing marriage patterns. They are not the same. There may not be any cause and effect between the two at all.
WIERD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Key features of WEIRD psychology, as identified by Henrich, include:
1) Individualism – Emphasis on personal autonomy, self-expression, and independence.
2) Analytical thinking – Tendency to focus on objects independently of their context, using formal logic and categorization.
3) Impersonal prosociality – Cooperation with strangers and adherence to abstract rules or norms (e.g., legal systems), rather than kin-based or face-to-face reciprocity.
4) Guilt-based morality – Moral reasoning rooted in internalized guilt and individual conscience rather than external shame or honor.
5) Low relational thinking – Less emphasis on social roles, obligations, and context-specific behaviors.
I don't think the Germanic peoples of Roman times, or the French in the 9th century fit that description at all, regardless of their marriage patterns.
In fact, you are giving evidence that marriage patterns do not lead to WIERD psychology.
I know that Henrich assumes that WIERD psychology stems from the Catholic church changing marriage patterns, but that is the supposed cause, not the effect that needs to be explained. You seem to agree with Henrich that WIERD psychologies come from marriage patterns, but you think that Western marriage patterns occurred long before the Catholic church.
But neither of you gives much evidence that unique marriage patterns are what actually created WIERD psychologies.
I am not convinced that the Chinese, Parsis, Armenians, Jews, and Igbos lived in Commercial societies for centuries. It is true that they were successful middleman minorities in societies dominated by other ethnic groups, but I am not sure that is the same. It might lead to very different outcomes.
Behavior indicates psychology. I'm not inferring anything here. If people married in their mid to late 20s and died in their 40s, they would be spending about a third of their adulthood as individuals. That is very unusual if we look at other world cultures.
Behavior and psychology are both part of the same adaptive package. So I'm not really agreeing with Heinrich's argument that a certain behavioral pattern caused a certain psychological pattern. The two coevolved together.
perhaps there are subtle genetic differences between northern euroasians and southcentral asians (chinese), southeastern asians, austronesians, indigenous north and south american and various african lineages that are the result of the different genetic mxtures (sapien, neanderthal, denisovan, related hominins and subsequent the various hunter-gatherer lineages) that occurred in the various societies and how those pre-historical societies selected for certain more successful lineages to predominate. various tribal cultures developed certain technologies and lifestyle approaches and prehistoric cultures faced "selective" pressures" from "alien" cultures (adapt or defend yourself successfully or be obliterated as a culture and "people"). the result is that WEIRD societies and the lineages most successful in enlarging themselves within this technological-social network survive and prosper (multiply over generations). their behaviour forced other cultures to change and adapt to changed circumstances (e.g. being conquered by an outsider tribe with a different social structure). and WEIRD is the predominant culture in our times....it conquered the world in the 1500-1700's (european exploration and colonization of the world with guns and horses and disease and ocean going vessels to span the globe and pillage and enslave the "more technologically primitive inhabitants"). we live in that world now, but it may not necessarily be "democratic" in the future.
Perhaps, but that seems pretty speculative to me. I do not think that there is much evidence for higher levels of development in Northwest Europe before 1200. In fact, the region was a laggard compared to most agricultural regions in Eurasia.
Interesting, and research seems to support the idea that preexisting tendencies have been formalised in Christianity. As to the specifics of the reasons why, perhaps the greater degree of individual self-sufficiency, and ability to adapt to lone environments predisposed NW Europeans to more individualism. That is not to say clans and family lines were unimportant, but the multiple layers of Roman and Germanic customs, cultural and ethnic cross-pollination and more fundamentally, climate which demands a lot of personal investment for survival means that small family groups are preferred, as opposed to a large number of closely related people that strain boh resource availability and genetic variability.
The mystery is why WEIRDness evolved in northwest Europeans and not in other populations. The only thing that really sets them apart in prehistory would be the large numbers of fisher-sealers who lived around the North Sea and the Baltic during Mesolithic times. This was one of the few cases where humans developed large semi-sedentary communities without the benefit of farming. For half of the year, they congregated in large coastal settlements for fishing and sealing.
That kind of social environment may have weakened kinship ties in order to reduce clan rivalry. There may also have been selection for impersonal pro-sociality and for moral systems that apply equally to everyone, regardless of kin relatedness.
I think you are right to link those changes to the proximity of sea-based resources, where NW Europe centres around the North Sea. I would not discount influence of cultural effects, which could have an epigenetic effect when combined with those resource limitations and patterns.
Seafaring might have contributed as well, and perhaps the degree of independence afforded by the ability to navigate and travel from place to place, combined with the seasonal settlements meant that kinship was not as important, if you could pack up your folks on a boat and go wherever the fishing was better. Clan relations and numbers are important for animal husbandry or control over fertile land, but if you want the ability to swiftly move from place to place, but at the same time want to be able to survive at sea, your kinship groups downsize, but then you have greater likelihood to help strangers in need at sea, as you would expect similar reciprocity. But that's all speculative.
Overall this puzzle is one that continues to drive the exceptionality of WEIRD, but perhaps there is a degree of narrow focus that overplays these factors - weight of cultural development for the first few millennia rested with the Mediterranean, while land power rested with the steppe peoples of Eastern Europe and the Pontic Steppe, who used their animal husbandry to control both kinship and land.
I'm surprised as well. My previous understanding was the total opposite- i.e, that restrictions on cousin marriage were something imposed on the pagan world very much in opposition to their habit and custom (I guess monogamy was more of the imposition in that respect.)
Christianity arose in the Middle East, where polygyny and cousin marriage were accepted practices. The restrictions placed on both reflect the Europeanization of Christianity.
I'm pretty confident pre-Christian nordic/celtic societies weren't monogamous, though maybe that was the norm in the greco-roman world?
If we look at the ratio of Y chromosome diversity to X chromosome diversity, we find that it is highest among Europeans and lowest among Sub-Saharan Africans. This suggests that the polygyny rate was much lower among Europeans both in historic and prehistoric times.
Scozzari, R., Cruciani, F., Malaspina, P., Santolamazza, P., Ciminelli, B. M., Torroni, A., ... & Novelletto, A. (1997). Differential structuring of human populations for homologous X and Y microsatellite loci. The American Journal of Human Genetics, 61(3), 719-733. https://doi.org/10.1086/515500
Torroni, A., Semino, O., Scozzari, R., Sirugo, G., Spedini, G., Abbas, N., ... & Benerecetti, A. S. (1990). Y chromosome DNA polymorphisms in human populations: differences between Caucasoids and Africans detected by 49a and 49f probes. Annals of human genetics, 54(4), 287-296. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-1809.1990.tb00384.x
The excerpt you quoted from Gnecchi-Ruscone et al., 2024 explicitly mentions "a high occurrence of levirate and multipartner unions". It's right there, man.
Maybe this was more pronounced in SSA, but Charlemagne had three wives and several concubines, IIRC, and he was technically Christian.
What do you think the term "high occurrence" means in this context? Out of a total of 236 male individuals, the authors found 15 cases of polygyny. Most of the cases may involve serial polygyny, but it's impossible to say for sure.
That's a polygyny rate of 6%, most of which may be serial polygyny.
As for Charlemagne, he was a monarch — in fact, one of the most powerful monarchs of his time. In Sub-Saharan Africa, polygyny was much more widespread, being practiced by over 20% of the men and most of the women.
Fuck my stupid chud life. This is the second time something I have been writing about has gotten posted by someone else before I could finish it.
It is quite evident that the people of Northwestern Europe are different from others. However, Christianity played a minimal role in differentiation. Christianity adopted the existing norms.
Didn't Aporia post research a while back indicating genetic changes during the Christian period after a period of late-Roman dysgenics? Small sample size made me a bit skeptical though.
You're probably referring to this article:
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/how-christianity-reversed-the-roman?utm_source=publication-search
I believe there has been a coevolution between Christianity and Europeans. Christianity helped reverse the decline of the family, especially among the elites, at a time when paganism could do nothing.
Again, Christianity did not so much create new values as give new life to old ones that had fallen into decay and decline.
Yes, I think that's it. It's curious that greco-roman paganism wasn't able to reform itself when it had clearly been able to sustain a high level of civilisation previously, though. Maybe political syncretism/hollow orthopraxy sapped the energy somehow?
There were attempts to reform paganism, but they were ultimately efforts to create a pagan form of Christianity. So why choose a photocopy, when you can get the original?
I don't know. Nostalgia? National pride? Continuity with ancestral tradition? There had to be ascetic/apollonian elements of pagan religious practice to fall back on, it just seems odd that those were never revived if the cultural appetite for it was there.
There was a brief revival under Julian the Apostate. But one man can do only so much, and the majority of Romans were at best part-time pagans. There was no pagan "church" that could teach paganism and motivate people to be pagan.
In contrast, Christians excelled at organization and indoctrination. They had unity of action and purpose. They knew what they wanted, and they methodically went about doing it.
The most obvious impact of Christianity on European family structure was probably the ban on polygamy by European elites and the valorisation of romantic love.
Also given that Islam, another universalistic religion, might have introduced cousin marriages to many regions, makes the spread of Christianity in Europe good because it could be used as a collective bulwark against Islam.
Cousin marriage was more common in the Middle East than in Europe even before Islam. It seems to have begun because people were afraid of marrying someone who had a "tainted" bloodline (e.g., a slave ancestor). Since people knew their own bloodline better than those of others, they considered it "safer" to marry a cousin.
Christianity began in the Middle East, where polygyny was accepted (although subject to certain limitations). The ban on polygyny developed as Christianity became Europeanized. This form of marriage and concubinage did become common during the time of Imperial Rome, but it was considered to be "un-Roman." In banning it, the Church was seeking to restore pre-existing sexual norms.
Curiously, the European Accomplishment Area is entirely contained within the "WEIRD" area.
I recently read Joseph Henrich’s Weirdest People in the World. Fascinating book. But it’s interesting to read a contrary opinion on the cousin marriage ban hypothesis.
Joseph Heinrich has done a great service by focusing attention on this subject.
I’m curious about what the bones of people living in conflict-intense places like pre-Christian Ireland and Scotland (including Northumbria that had seen 700 years of unceasing violence). They seemed to be far more clannish as a result of warrior culture. At the same time, the Northumbrians didn’t hesitate to prefer a hermitage-type settlement in Backcountry of America, but would still rally as a clan to a call for help. This blend of individualistic and clannish behavior seemed to help them be more flexible with evolving circumstances.
The Celtic fringe of Europe seems to be less individualistic and more clannish, i.e., Irish, Scottish, and Icelanders (who are part Irish by ancestry). It looks like the selection pressure for individualism was strongest among the populations bordering the North Sea and the Baltic. It was progressively weaker in populations farther away.
Yes, this has been my observation too from your notes and the others. I am growing more convinced that the fish-eating tribes around the North Sea is the real source of modernity as the major groups behind the early industrialization and individualistic ethics tends to be the Dutch, England’s Kent, East Anglia, and Midlands, and Germany’s Hanseatic League. King Edward III’s woolen goods policy may be the first deliberate industry policy, later built on by Henry VII.
I guess without Christianity we’d have been more like the Japanese?
Even if Christianity had never existed, something like it would have developed in Europe, and even more so in northwest Europe.
First, Roman society had large numbers of rootless people with no close kin to help them out. This was especially true for slaves and ex-slaves, but it was also true for other people. The low birth rate left many adults without close kin. For such people, the local church offered a substitute family and recreated a family atmosphere with the help of kinship symbolism ("brothers and sisters in Christ," "God the father," etc.).
Second, as civilization spread into northwest Europe, the local beliefs and customs would have been reorganized into something like Christianity. People would still have needed some kind of institutionalized means to purge their burden of guilt, e.g., confession, penance, absolution, etc. They would also have institutionalized charity in various ways, e.g., alms for the poor, hospices, etc.
All of this was less true in Japan. The Japanese do not accumulate a burden of guilt that has to be regularly purged, as is the case with northwest Europeans. Nor do they have the same compulsive need to help strangers.
The Church of Fisher King around the North Sea like Frey-Ing?
Can't help but think of Jesus asking "Who is my mother?" as the Virgin Mary pines outside the tent in Matthew 12:46-50.
Jesus wished to reduce, if not eliminate, the importance of kinship in a society where kinship was all important. This is partly why Christianity enjoyed more success in Europe than in the Middle East.
Beautifully interesting, thank you. Probably people would jump on their cousins for the simple reason that the cousins were the humans close and available, not particularly for their cousin-ness. Assuming that this tendency would have been driven by genes and that there would have been a genetic change somehow intertwined with the cultural change that would have weakened this tendency: Would it make sense to look for a correlation with the known genetic markers for autistic traits?
Cousins are "pre-vetted." You already know almost everything about their background and ancestry. If need be, you can ask your own parents for more information. This is why Charles Darwin married his first cousin; she was already part of his social circle. There was no need to have someone introduce her to him.
It's important to distinguish between three things: 1) avoidance of cousin marriage; 2) non-avoidance of cousin marriage; and 3) preference for cousin marriage. In pre-Christian Europe, the aDNA evidence suggests that people were deliberately avoiding cousin marriage. This suggests some kind of cultural norm against it, which Christianity later assimilated, especially Western Christianity.
Preference for cousin marriage is the opposite, i.e., a cultural norm favoring cousin marriage. Perhaps this cultural norm may have selected for an innate, hardwired preference in certain human populations, but I don't know of any research on the subject.
Very good article.
Right now I'm trying to write an essay on the evolution of consciousness in the animal kingdom. I begin with mere animal sentience, which I define as the ability to distinguish physical pleasure and pain and to respond accordingly. Next I add memory, i.e., an ability to learn from experience, which gives rise to emotions like fear, anxiety, hope, anticipation and the like. Then after memory I add sex and sexual reproduction, which gives rise to alpha male dominance behavior, status striving, and along with them to emotions like love,, envy, jealousy, hatred and commitment to kin. And then finally I try to survey all of those higher, complex human emotions brought into being by by the appearance of language and culture working in combination with an enormous increase in average human intelligence: everything from feelings of boredom and curiosity to an ability to enjoy myths, fables, songs, wit, humor, music, art, and so on that are found in all human societies, both primitive and civilized. The human desire to be entertained, especially once one's other needs have been met, is virtually insatiable.
Now when it comes to that unique northwestern European WEIRD culture Peter is writing about here, I think we must add to this list all those complex emotions that we associate with our commitment to Western liberal ideals of freedom and justice: ideals that find their first and most beautiful expression in the hopes and dreams of Judeo-Christianity, and which today's patriotic Americans feel whenever they contemplate sacred documents like the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, for which they feel a deep sense of gratitude and appreciation.
In addition, WEIRDness would also seem seem to lie behind those emotions that motivate a widespread if not universal hunger to understand the world and the universe we live in in abstract rational terms, a hunger that was first manifested in classical Greece (another WEIRD society?) and that finds its most characteristic expression in today's social and physical sciences.
Is there anything major I've left off of this list?
How about peer pressure and emotions of conformity, embarrassment, guilt, and the like that we associate with our being social animals living in relatively outbred, un-consanguineous groups, feelings of the kind Adam Smith was writing about in his Theory of Moral Sentiments?
I would appreciate anything Peter has to say on this subject.
WEIRD people have moved from kin-based morality to universal morality. In other words, they like to obey universal rules and dislike asking "Is it good for us folks?"
This doesn't mean that WEIRD people cannot draw a line between insiders and outsiders. In fact, they can hate outsiders with an extreme passion, but they define this hatred in moralistic terms. The Other isn't simply different. The Other is evil.
Northwest Europeans seem to have a stronger desire to identify "rules" and then follow them without question, come what may. This is what we call a "conscience" and what Sigmund Freud called the "super ego." The super ego enforces the rules by punishing the rule-breaker with feelings of guilt. Thus, without a strong capacity for guilt, humans cannot progress from the family-based morality of small societies to the universal morality of large ones:
"If civilization is a necessary course of development from the family to humanity as a whole, then ... there is inextricably bound up with it an increase of the sense of guilt, which will perhaps reach heights that the individual finds hard to tolerate." (Freud, 1962, p. 80).
This super ego can terrorize you into obeying the rules. Although the rules are softwired, your desire to follow them, and be punished for breaking them, is hardwired:
"... for the new authority, the super-ego, has no motive that we know of for ill-treating the ego, with which it is intimately bound up; but genetic influence, which leads to the survival of what is past and has been surmounted, makes itself felt in the fact that fundamentally things remain as they were at the beginning. The super-ego torments the sinful ego with the same feeling of anxiety and is on the watch for opportunities of getting it punished by the external world." (Freud, 1962, p. 72)
This is an awkward translation. By "genetic influence, which leads to the survival of what is past and has been surmounted," he means inherited mental traits that exist because they have helped humans survive and reproduce in the past. The super ego is thus an innate structure in your mind that torments you for breaking the rules. It can even compel you to seek punishment in "the external world."
Freud, S. (1962[1930]). Civilization and Its Discontents, New York: W.W. Norton
I’d still place restrictions on cousin marriage as downstream of western weirdness, not causal. I think a soft institutional perspective brought on by western individualism is at the core, and that likely comes from western religious organization and philosophy. Fascinating read, though.
At the time, the restrictions were referred to as "Germanic." I agree that the Western Church played a key organizational role in consolidating existing norms and enforcing them more effectively.
Pre-Christian Europeans were always more individualistic than other human groups that were more group dominated, suppressed and therefore had no large unity for defense strength. They invented their way out of problems or migrated. Both positive and negative results. Christianity was imposed via financial leverage at first. The combination of the two led to their loss of cultural continuity and being destroyed from the core outward. Shreds remain in distorted forms.
> "Christianity was imposed via financial leverage at first"
Citation needed?
I recall one of the emperors in Europe was told he had to have everyone of his subjects converted so he could be part of a trading arrangement. Not a history buff but that stayed with me once I heard it.
Looks great but I'll need an evening to get through it. Thanks
For those who are not familiar with the Henrich book that this article refers to, here is a summary of it on my online library of book summaries:
https://techratchet.com/2021/03/17/book-summary-the-wierdest-people-in-the-world-by-joseph-henrich/